Gnaw Their Tongues: Abyss of Longing Throats (Crucial Blast, 2015)

Like the now-defunct Wold, Gnaw Their Tongues (a solo project of a Dutch musician named Mories) blurs the line between black metal and harsh noise. He’s released dozens of albums and EPs, and most of his albums and songs have long, ridiculous titles. It’s hard to even tell if there’s actual guitars on this album, it might just be electronics, but he manages to shape the feedback into riffs as well as squalls of noise. It even sounds like there’s horror-movie strings and horns buried in the mix. The vocals are never less than ghastly and demonic, and only Satan knows what he’s howling about. “Through Flesh” is surprisingly musical for this sort of thing. “Abyss of Longing Throats” is the album’s most straightforward black metal-sounding track, with pulverizing blastbeats and riffs, as well as a spoken word break about “the martyrs of Christ be[ing] tortured”. The drums on The Holy Body” strike with precision, framing Mories’ tortured howls. “And They Will Be Cast Out Into Utter Darkness” is the album’s trippiest track, weaving warped strings and shifting drums, which morph tempos with no advance notice. “Up Into the Heavens Down Into the Circles of Hell” buries some operatic vocals underneath the shrieking, leading the album to its apocalyptic end.